The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

When to Club there remained the smaller leg – to pass by the Smithy Shop Floor, the All-Plant Bath House, the Fire Brigade building, the Oxygen Tank Filling Station and the Medical Center, Skully raced up from the Mechanical Shop Floor to inform that Borya Sakoon sent after us and if we didn't show up we'd be fired.

That was some news, our Overseer at the Experimental Unit never came up with so fiery threats. Could it happen the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department came on another visit?

So we rested the sheet against the smoky wall of the Smithy Shop Floor under the marble tablet screwed to the bricks to announce that in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Power, there was embedded a message to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant workers who would work there in the year of the centennial anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Making sure that our sheet did not interfere with the traffic, we went to the Repair Shop Floor.

Borya was raging way more furiously than Fant?mas himself – where the heck we two been paddling when the whole Experimental Unit was sent to Harvesting?.

Yes, Harvesting was not a thing to shrug away. It was like parading the entire workforce of the Experimental Unit. That was the moment when everyone was engaged in earnest, to the utmost.

All the locksmiths from the Experimental Unit, in full collection, with the paper slip of order listing the required materials and quantities, were making for the Central Warehouse. There, behind the All-Plant Bath House, heaps of rebar rods of divers diameter, by heaps of metal fittings of powerful profiles, by heaps of pipes with the cross-section of no less than 10 centimeters were piled crisscross by the railway track.

Soon after, the workmen were joined by a dolly-car, and then along the tracks about the Central Warehouse, a stocky railway crane would roll to their group and hover the dangling steel cables of its beam over the tangled heaps and hills of all those piles of metal.

Two of the most experienced workers, equipped with steely breakers, would noose the pipes, rebars or channels named in the paper slip. The rest of the congregation, keeping a reasonably safe distance, would profusely share their sage advice and agitated comments. At last, the crane would strenuously yank the snapped bunch of metal, pull it up and, with scraping screech, tear out from the heap of iron jumbled with all the previous Harvestings by representatives of different shop floors.

The catch would then be lowered onto the waiting dolly-car. The Ware House employee would compare the approximate amount of the cargo with the figures scribbled in the order and give his "go ahead". Returning from a safe distance, the dolly-car driver would drive it to the Repair Shop Floor, scraping, on the way, the asphalt of the paths with dangling ends of rebars, or pipes or whatever else was there in the paper slip. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit would start back to the Repair Shop Floor in one, cheerful, monolithic mass, proud of the fulfilled duty…

And now the coming back harvesters appeared from the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, yet we were not among them. We failed to attend the holy rite of Harvesting. Fortunately, our Overseer had a kinda soft sport for Vladya because of having the mutual last name, even though without being relatives, and we again slipped from the Experimental Unit directly to our sheet under the memorial tablet.

The Manager of the Repair Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, Mozgovoy, stood next to it eyeing the plywood avidly and swallowing his managerial saliva. Of course, such a material would whet anyone's appetite. We clawed our prey like two winning vultures.

"Where to?" asked, in pain, Mozgovoy in his plaintive falsetto.

"To the Plant Management," said, casually, Vladya and we dragged the sheet in the direction of the Main Check-Entrance next to the backside of the Club building that substituted—for the stretch of its length—the wall around Plant.

The back door, sure thing, was not locked. We dragged the sheet in and leaned it against the bunch of canvas-covered frames opposite the movie list painters' room…

When after work we came to Club to move the plywood to our room, the crisp-curled House Manager, Stepan, was already wheeling round and about our sheet. By so deficit material, anyone could be tempted into improper dreams and plans, even a do-nothing, who in all of his life did not hold in his fatty hands anything heavier than his personal bunch of keys. Which is not about Stepan though, who once was a good carpenter they said, it's about the Director of Club, who stood by and tinkled his keys hallooing Stepan to our trophy. Don't rub the soap to your cheeks, Pavel Mitrofanovich, it's not your shaving day, as ran a winged Settlement byword rather popular at those days…

~ ~ ~

The winter broke out somehow straightaway, the snowdrifts piled high up as if they always were there… Before the dances, I went to pick up Olga. She introduced me to the khutta's elders and betters who turned so glad and full of invitations to take my coat off, get seated and have a drink, but, no, thank you, I still had to work that night and it was time for us to leave. So Olga got dressed and we left.

Yet, it was a bit early for Club because we weren't moving the equipment from the stage and only locked the Mirror Hall after the dances. To pass the spare time, we visited the bench by the oil storage Base. Olga had a bottle of wine in her bag and we drank it, not too much though just to tone up in general as well as to get warm. And then we went to Club treading the crunchy snow crust tightened by the traffic's tires and treds in the passers’-by footwear…

Already at night, moonless and dark, yet with the myriads of bright star-specks pricking the sky everywhere, we came to revise the unfinished bottle of red wine stashed away in the snowdrifts… The wine felt too cold for making you warm, and as tasteless as ice. We scarcely drank half of what was still there and had a smoke.

Then I unbuttoned my coat, she unbuttoned hers and got seated in my lap. We had already used to treat each other as personal property. I might freely run my hand deep into her pantyhose to reach the convex concavity item which I missed on the crazy cuckoo's night. She, in her turn, casually undid my belt and unbuttoned the fly for a comfortable grip at my boner.

Everything went on in the usual groove with long, like a protracted dive into another dimension, kisses blended in. But, all of a sudden, there happened something of which I couldn’t understand what or how but only that it was somewhere else… where I got into… out of myself… and mingling with… the fusion grew firmer with each push… no I remained anymore just we… we… we… and nothing else… unmakeoutable… doesn't matter… and all's swimming… blurred with blindfolding mist… what's that?. What?!. Oh, no!. More!.

The connection was lost. The night slowly emerged back from nowhere… the snowdrifts… the bench… there again… A couple of thrusts after the elusive new world showed there was nothing to sustain, to return, to keep on with.

We broke apart becoming her and me again. Stunned, I stood up.

That same bulb from up its post. Winks of sparks from the snowdrifts around. The black sky in pin-pricks of stars…

When no one would think of thinking…

Where's my hat? Dammit, wherever be it can wait…

November 17… 17-year-old locksmith apprentice… lost his virginity…

And she?

(…I do not know until now.

It does not matter.

Who cares?.)

Saying goodbye to her, so quaintly quiet, by the khutta of her aunt, I realized that now it was my duty to be stronger than she and I did not have to give much thought to anything else, from now and forever and ever.

(…Here! Here! Wow!

I can present ideas in a pretty form, can I?

Subsequently though… Decades after…)

The following evening I came to the Evening School of Working Youth where Olga at times attended classes because Aunt Nina pressed for the paper about her finishing eighth grade.

After the break bell, she went out into the corridor and left with me skipping the rest of the classes. I saw Olga to her aunt's khutta following her heated report about the record-making bleeding she had the previous night.

(…as if it means anything.

What's the point in all the maidenheads, circumcisions, adulteries and faithfulness forever and a day?

“What was – is no more, for good.
What is – flows away thru clenched fingers.
What is to come – can't be avoided…)

It was not possible, of course, for our love affair to melt the ice and snow of the winter all around us, yet all the winter snow and ice could not suppress our flaming ardor. Moreover, we fanned the passion's flame at the least opportunity.

The snow-clad bench by the oil storage Base was soon rejected because of its unwanted backrest… The sheet-iron trailer by the tiny ice rink in the Plant Park was more convenient, but it took an unbearably long stretch of time waiting until the bros would finish their wine, then go thru their atomic reports to each other about what kind and which dosage of alcohol they consumed earlier on that day and which circumstances led to having it in their current composition, concluding the brag session with argumentative punches at each other's mug (without drawing the knife though), before they, at last, dispersed.

Drawing the knife when Kolyan was around, a bro could just as well kiss it goodbye before the inexorably pending confiscation… Kolyan O’ Settlement was a specimen of the increasingly scanty breed of heroes. Not too large an exemplar though, he was only 1 meter and 80, and utterly laconic. On the other hand, he didn't really need to flash eloquence because a fleeting glance at those fists about 20 kilos each was enough to dry up any wish for odd discussions. Even for a dumbo repeatedly surprised with a sandbag on his conk from around the corner, it was immediately clear that Kolyan would make a toast of him in less than 6 secs flat. Among the bros, of course, he could say a thing or 2, only you had to sit on a sufficient stock of patience while waiting till his words were out, after all.

Admittance to the trailer was granted us because he miscalculated me for a champion-bro in a specific line which irrevocable mistake he entertained since my "engagement" with Olga back in summer as we just started going out together.

One evening starting off to the Plant Park, I spruced my little finger up with a ring cajoled out of my sister. A casual tawdry fake it was with a splinter of glass or something. Rather reluctantly, Natasha farmed it out after I swore it was just for that one time.

In the Plant Park, Olga and I climbed up to the projectionist booth in the summer cinema whose key was obtained from the younger projectionist, Grisha Zaychenko. The moment she saw the ring on my little finger, Olga clung tighter than a leaf from the sauna whisker in the steam-room: who gave me that?

Borrowed from Kiddy, said I, my younger sister.

With outright disbelief, Olga demanded the thing for a closer inspection. Hardly had I passed the ring when she clapped it on her finger, some other than the little one though.

Okay, says I, that was enough for showing off and let her give it back for I had promised Natasha to return, it was, like, from her boyfriend.